Anyone watch Modern Family? There was an episode that aired in Australia last night that saw the older dad (with the hot wife) choke out the gay son (who wanted to learn self defense because what he learnt from West Side Story didn't work, the subject of a recent cracked.com article which I now see might not be coincidence) using a Mata Leao he learnt from "the Gracie brothers".

In case you didn't know, the older dad (Ed O'neil) is a Rorian Gracie Black Belt.

In case you didn't know, the older dad (Ed O'neil) is a Rorian Gracie Black Belt.

I did know that, it has been on bullshido.net and in a few magazines I buy, but good info for noobs. I see my quotation marks could be taken as me being cynical, but it was an actual quote from the show.

lol i call bullshit on that, i remember my mates setting a few fires when we was kids often to bins and stuff... Just because we was kids and when your young you often do stupid **** like that.

Another fun one was lighting a fire work spinning it around on the floor and running like **** in any direction to get away, kind of like russian roulette with a catherine wheel.

Kids are dumb.

Man, you lived dangerously. We just copied WWF moves (including smacking each other with 2x4s) full power on concrete or grass - and sometimes played on building sites, throwing bricks at each other, climbing scaffolding, smoking cigarettes in half-built houses and stuff.

Now the question is whether this is a real phenomenon at all or just a conflation/whitewashing of autoerotic asphyxia and suicide, &c.—and, furthermore, whether the remaining phenomenon really has any prevalence to speak of. Maybe so, maybe not; it sounds an awful lot like Yet Another Moral Panic to me.

I initially compared it to the "rainbow game", where the high school chicks had different colour lipstick and gave the guys blow jobs, it appeared on Oprah and gave politicians looking to moralize on the youth of today a soapbox. Unfortunately, there was not a single shred of evidence to suggest the game had been played anywhere, let alone being "widespread". Like in this instance, it might have happened here or there, but do you really think anyone involved is going to inform the media?

If kids are out playing the choking game, there will be loads of videos of it on YouTube (I haven't looked) - just about every stupid thing that kids do these days gets filmed on cellphone cameras and uploaded.

I'm wondering if this is another "jenkum" round of creative nonsense. Still though, it brings a certain chuckle to my day.

Didn't people actually start trying that after the media started talking about it? :lol:

I'm reminded a bit of how Mephedrone wasn't actually called 'meow meow' on the str33tz until the British press started referring to it as 'meow meow' - but then people started referring to it as that...